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"In order to recruit new members on a scale that would be required to significantly rebuild union power, unions must fundamentally alter their internal organizational practices. This means creating more organizer positions on the staff; developing programs to teach current members how to handle the tasks involved in resolving shop-floor grievances; and building programs that train members to participate fully in the work of external organizing. Such a reorientation entails redefining the very meaning of union membership from a relatively passive stance toward one of continuous active engagement."—from the Introduction In Rebuilding Labor Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss bring together established researchers and a new generation of labor scholars to assess the current state of labor organizing and its relationship to union revitalization. Throughout this collection, the focus is on the formidable challenges unions face today and on how they may be overcome. Rebuilding Labor begins with a comprehensive overview of recent union organizing in the United States; goes on to present a series of richly detailed case studies of such topics as union leadership, organizer recruitment and retention, union democracy, and the dynamics of anti-unionism among rank-and-file workers; and concludes with a quantitative chapter on the relationship between union victories and establishment survival. This interdisciplinary collection of original scholarship on New Labor offers a window into an otherwise invisible emergent social movement.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"You've seen the numbers on union density and representation elections. You've heard the AFL-CIO mantra 'organize, organize, organize.' Behind the numbers is the behavior of real people: organizers, workers who want to unionize, and workers who do not. Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement tells their story in compelling terms. This is a powerful book about the reality of unionism in today's United States."—Richard Freeman, Professor of Economics, Harvard University and author of What Do Unions Do? and What Workers Want

"Theory and praxis are here united in a practical, yet methodologically sophisticated set of studies that probe the difficult terrain of twenty-first-century union organizing. Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss are among our most surefooted guides to this new frontier."—Nelson Lichtenstein, Professor of History, University of California at Santa Barbara and author of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor

"With working people facing the worst crisis in generations and corporate power surging out of control, the union movement—now only 8 percent of the private sector workforce—can no longer afford strategies, structures, and cultures that are 75 years old. We need an historic transformation to involve workers and communities in forming unions in whole industries, whole corporations, and whole markets and regions—both in the U.S. and across borders."—Andrew L. Stern, President, Service Employees International Union (SEIU)

"Rebuilding Labor breaks new ground in providing rich empirical material and careful analysis for understanding the dynamics of contemporary labor organizing. The book as a whole is a very persuasive demonstration of the crucial value of systematic empirical research for the labor movement."—Richard Flacks, University of California at Santa Barbara

About the Author

Ruth Milkman is Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and Academic Director of CUNY's Murphy Labor Institute. She is the author of several books, including the prizewinning Gender at Work and L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement. She is the coauthor of Unfinished Business, editor of Organizing Immigrants, and coeditor of New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement, Rebuilding Labor, and Working for Justice, all from Cornell.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I'm happy to see that Amazon will allow you to view the table of contents. This book is a series of academic 'papers' so read the table of contents to see the different topics covered re: organizing labor. This book deals mainly with External Organizing ('organizing the unorganized'). It's informative for the novice organizer but seems to have been written for the established union dealing with organizing rather than for the new organizer herself. The introduction and first four papers (the strategy of organizing rather than maintaining and servicing the contract, the dynamics of union staff vs. member participation, and the two chapters about why and how people resist organization) are helpful to both the new or working organizer and the higher level union staff deciding how to use organizers. The last five papers (how to retain organizing staff, how to best utilize interns, trends in upper level union management, and developing political strategies) seem aimed only at the upper levels of union staff. The different papers have different authors, so some articles are very mathematical and chart-heavy, while others are not. The SEIU and California labor campaigns in particular receive a lot of attention in terms of the 'case studies' and illustrative examples, but the authors move out to broader points applicable to any union. Considering this is a textbook, it flows along pretty well. It is not overly difficult to read, and not overly dry. The individual articles are clearly focused on a single topic each and written in a simple, straightforward manner.